338 



this connection may not be a corruption o± girasoie, tnougn not 

 necessarily of the Italian girasoie* Indeed it looks as if the 

 transference of girasoie from the fire-opal and the Ricirtus to the 

 sunflower may have taken place in England earlier than in Italy, 

 tor in Sidney's Arcadia (1586) there is a fanciful personification 

 in tbe lines 



i i 



With gazing eyes he lookes, short sig-hs, unsettled feet, 



, t 



Now if Sidney here meant to personify the sunflower, as is 

 assumed by the Oxford English Dictionary sub voce Girasoie, 

 the word might easily have been applied by some scholar-gardener 

 under Euplmist influences to the tuberous flelianthus when it 

 made its appearance here, and any unlettered gardener who heard 

 the name would most easily repeat the ill-caught sound as 

 Jerusalem. This is of course a mere speculation, but it is the 

 only suggestion I can put forward to account for an etymology 

 that I am loth to abandon finally though it must certainly be 

 rejected in the form in which it was proposed by Sir J. E. Smith. 



Tbe tubers of Helianthus tuberosus known to the early authors 

 — Colonna, Ravelinghen, Goodyer, Parkinson — were of a red or 

 reddish-brown colour outside, and Prof. N. L. Britton writes 

 from the New York botanical garden on December 21st, 1918 : 

 u so far as my knowledge extends the wild plant has only red 

 tubers." In 1889 the late Mr. Barron, Secretary to the Royal 



a 



Horticultural Society, in his report on the vegetable conference 

 of that year, called attention to the fact that only one variety 

 was grown ; but soon afterwards the white-skinned variety, which 

 is now the favourite, was introduced bv Messrs. Sutton. In 

 their catalogue (Amateur's Guide in Horticulture) for 1891, p. 47, 

 they say : " We are glad to be able to offer a great novelty, the 

 tubers of which were discovered by a botanist in South America, 

 and have been grown in this country for the past five years." 

 Mr. Arthur Sutton has kindly informed me that this " white 

 artichoke" introduced by his firm in 1891, was purchased from 

 Mr. P. H. Pierce, of St. Dunstan's nursery at Canterbury, on 

 December 24th, 1889, for the sum of £7, and 'was supposed to have 

 been collected by a botanical friend of Mr, Pierce in South 

 America. But the South American origin is hardly credible, 

 and Mr. Walter R. Pierce, of St. Dunstan's, on being referred 

 to, does not adhere to it. He writes to Messrs. Sutton on 





January 11th, 1919, " I raised the white Jerusalem Artichoke 

 from a tuberous-rooted Helianthus. which a friend of mine (Dr. 

 Brodie) imported from abroad. It may have come from South 

 America with a lot of other specimens lie received, but I believe 

 it came from Holland." For the present therefore the origin 

 of this white kind remains obscure. Another form known as tbe 

 Rose Artichoke in growers' lists was introduced into England in 



Against the probability of tbe corruption of the Italian word finto 

 Jerusalem, it may be pointed out that in Italian qlrasnle has two accented 

 syllables, both long in quantity, neither of which is the syllable on "which 

 the stress falls in our Jerusalem. 



t p. 91 in the edition o e 1598. 



